Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

Lt. Reese finishes his coffee. “We should get going. There’s a lot of paperwork.”

I pull the watch from my pocket and hold it out to him. “And this. Is it-”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Just a watch. With a backlight. It was Randy’s idea…he figured you’d get suspicious if you didn’t think you were wired up. I wanted to put a fake body wire on you but Randy thought you’d piss your pants so he came up with this James Bond bullshit.” He takes the watch, puts it in his pocket. “I guess this is what happens when you’re pushed for time. You make mistakes.”

“What’s going to happen to those kids,” I say. “To Jamie?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him,” Lt. Reese says cryptically. I think this confirms what I figured out last night. That if I was OH-2…there had to be a-1. “So Jamie was-”

He just smiles. “Don’t ask me that.”

“None of those guys seemed like criminal masterminds,” I say. “Even Dave wasn’t as bad as you made him out to be. I think he was just caught up in it, like I was, over our heads.”

“Caught up? Over your head?” This is apparently the wrong thing to say to Lt. Reese, who spins on me, his old shitty self. “You were dealing drugs, fuck-nuts! You know the definition of a fucking drug dealer, Slippers? Someone who deals drugs!”

My boys have looked up from the tree fort. I hold up my hand to quiet Lt. Reese.

He continues more quietly: “The only difference between you and Dave? Is that you sucked at it. You think you’re different ’cause…what? You got kids? “Cause you used to have a job?”

Lt. Reese hands me his coffee cup, sighs. “You know the worst part of what I do: nobody ever deserves it. Nobody ever thinks they’re wrong. You’re all a bunch of assholes walking around crying, ‘It ain’t fair…I didn’t mean it…I got a bad deal.’”

“Amen,” says Dad.

Lt. Reese and I both look over at Dad, who rocks back and forth, staring off into space.

Lt. Reese reaches over and pats my father on the back. Then he stands. “You ready?”

“Can I go in and tell my wife?”

Lt. Reese looks at his empty cup. Sighs. “Get your dad and me some more coffee first.”

I get them each a cup. “Five minutes,” Lt. Reese says.

I nod. I don’t see the boys in the fort, so I walk over. They’re sitting on the floor, cross-legged in opposite corners, like boxers between rounds. They’re playing their Gameboys. Fifteen minutes in their new eleven-hundred-dollar fort and they’re back to playing video games.

“I love you guys.”

They look up, confused. “Okay,” Teddy says. I step into the fort. It really is solidly built. I feel strangely…proud. I bend down and hug them. Even Teddy hugs me back, awkwardly, but I’ll take it. They don’t ask where I’m going.

“Bye Dad,” I say. “I’m going to jail.”

He toasts me with his steaming coffee.

Then I start back toward the house. The stairs creak under my feet. The door to our bedroom is closed. I start to knock-then I grab the knob and open the door. Lisa looks startled. She’s staring out the window, chewing her thumbnail, her phone at her ear.

Wearing her heavy coat. She looks back and sees me. Her eyes are red and bleary. “I have to call you back,” she says into the phone. She closes it and turns to face me.

Our big suitcase is open on the bed. Nothing in it. I don’t know what this means. Has she not packed yet? Or changed her mind? Or is she expecting me to go?

She looks up and I catch her eyes-green, frightened.

I look down at the bed underneath that suitcase. “Lisa…I…” What do you say? Where do you start? “I am so sorry.”

BANKRUPTCY TURNS OUT TO be like an outdoor concert Lisa and I went to once. The gates were thrown open suddenly and we sprinted down this hill, way too fast, the crowd out of control, and I squeezed Lisa’s hand and we ran, but we could’ve slipped so easily, fallen, gotten trampled. “Don’t look back,” I just kept saying, “just keep moving forward.”

It turns out they have a Chapter 7 and a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I try not to dwell on the significance of the numbers. After disaster shopping for a while, Lisa and I decide to go with Chapter 13 (all of these prime, odd numbers…alone out there…disconnected from the pack), which is bankruptcy for people who are making some money, but not nearly enough to meet their debts. It’s not a great deal, but it’s certainly a better deal for us than for our creditors. The court takes everything we have, which is not much, and divvies it among the sharks. Anything we were making payments on goes back to the lenders-even our living room furniture, which we were close to paying off, even our dryer. Then we get to start from scratch, only with less stuff and with shitty credit. A few years ago, shitty credit wouldn’t have mattered; we could’ve bought Graceland. Now…the conservator assigned to our case feigns trying to help us keep our house, but there’s no way. When the packet from Providential Equity finally arrives, it turns out we can’t even get into their mortgage modification program. The numbers aren’t even close to penciling out and now that I have a conviction, for possession of narcotics with intent to deliver (I’m out on probation), we are no longer eligible. So, just months after giving me a reprieve, my friends in Benicia-Gilbert and Joy-end up with my house. It doesn’t help my case with Lisa, either, that I withheld not only being a drug dealer, but also the letter about our house being foreclosed. I wish she were angry, but all I get from her now is fatigue…cold, indifferent resignation.

The day before we are officially served with eviction papers by a sympathetic Sheriff’s deputy, we have a big garage sale, and watch people haul away the shit we should’ve gotten rid of years ago. It’s almost cathartic. I think Lisa does pretty well with her compulsive shopping boxes, maybe even turns a profit on the plush toys. I’m happy for her. The boys sell a bunch of their old games and toys, too, and make enough to buy a Wii. I’m happy for them, too.

And then…we move. Or at least I move, with the boys, to a two-bedroom apartment in a shrub-covered 1970s triplex on a busy street twenty blocks from downtown.

Lisa needs some space. Some time. The old me would’ve pointed out that they’re really the same-space and time, on a four-dimensional smooth continuum that theoretically allows for even more dimensions and explains such phenomena as time-dilation (although this relativity doesn’t explain the munchies) and I’d have been halfway to string theory as she was loading up her car. But the new me-quiet, humbled-just says, “Okay.” And, “Take as long as you need.”

She moves in with Dani, although I imagine she spends her

nights at Chuck’s. We agree that I’ll keep the boys in the apartment with me for the time being, until she gets settled. Since my apartment is near her optometrist’s office, Lisa will come by after school every day and stay with them until I get home from work-which is often quite late. When I get home she goes to Dani’s-or to Chuck’s. I don’t ask. This way, we hope, our split will disrupt the boys as little as possible. Sometimes when she’s there I’ll walk to Dad’s nursing home-which is less than a mile away-and watch TV with him. The boys aren’t happy about any of this; we tell them that sometimes Moms and Dads just need a little time apart, but they know. They take turns with self-pity and surliness, like video game controllers they hand back and forth.

I’ve yet to go back to our old house since we lost it…but Lisa confesses that she sometimes drives through our old neighborhood. I wish she wouldn’t torture herself that way. One night, when we’re having pizza in the apartment with the boys-we decide to keep having dinner together once a week, for their sake-Lisa tells me with disdain that our house sold at auction for three-fifty, two thirds of what we owed. “Doesn’t that make you furious?” she asks.